The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (27 page)

It is, of course, most unlikely that Wolsey would have wished to admit to the pope that he was on the point of being overthrown, but there are other reasons for suggesting that Wolsey’s apparent lack of concern was exaggerated. If one thing has emerged from this account of his handling of foreign policy it is that it was often unsuccessful, and certainly misunderstood, even by those whose task it was to implement it. For those who were not so close to Wolsey it must have appeared especially disastrous. Large sums of money were leaving the country, some of it provided by the taxpayers, and the results both in terms of prestige and real benefits were nil. It would therefore have been very surprising if there had not been a lot of criticism, both of his policies and of Wolsey himself. It was during this period, following his appointment as cardinal in September and lord chancellor in December 1515, that the full extent of his power became apparent. It was argued earlier that there had been no ‘coup’ by Wolsey then, and that, for instance, neither Warham nor Fox had been forced out of office by him.
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But this does not mean that people would not have been suspicious of what had taken place and extremely jealous. As lord chancellor Wolsey had made it very clear that he thought royal justice should not allow for any distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’, and to show that he meant business cases had been brought against the earl of Northumberland, the marquess of Dorset, and Lords Burgavenny and Hastings. Wolsey’s policy at home had much to recommend it, but coupled with his unsuccessful foreign policy and his rapid rise to power, it almost certainly meant that in the spring of 1518 there was some opposition to him. Its extent, however, should not be exaggerated.

One source for evidence of such opposition, discussed earlier in this chapter, is Giustinian’s reports,
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and the fact that he wrote about it should alert us to the possibility of some exaggeration. It was reassuring both to himself and his employers to believe that, but for Wolsey, the hated English policy would have been different, and the situation that Giustinian was in led him to clutch at straws. The other evidence for opposition should be treated with equal caution. It suited Maximilian in the spring of 1517 to embarrass Henry with news of internal opposition, while it was in the French interest in 1518 to put it around that Wolsey was about to be deposed. The point is not that all talk of opposition from foreign sources should be
discounted, only that it must be treated with the greatest care. It was one thing for someone at the English court to let slip a few critical remarks to a foreign ambassador; but quite another for him to want, or be able, to translate that criticism into action. And in the spring of 1518 there is no real evidence of any significant opposition.

It is known why Suffolk was viewed with some suspicion at this time. During the negotiations with the French in the previous November he had apparently put the French ambassadors ‘in comfort of the restitution of Tournai’.
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This is in itself a rather interesting misdemeanour, for one of the arguments here has been that both Henry and Wolsey were themselves keen to return Tournai – but for the best possible price. So they must have been annoyed, and perhaps a little suspicious, to find Suffolk undermining their bargaining position by suggesting to the French that Tournai was theirs for the asking. Moreover, given his previous close relationship with Francis, Suffolk must anyway have seemed the most likely leader of any plot, if, as the pope alleged, it was being master-minded by the French. Far less is known about Buckingham, also mentioned in Henry’s letter, and what little there is makes him a most unlikely collaborator with the French.
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Neither is there any evidence that any of the other noblemen were pro-French, and it is most unlikely that either Henry or Wolsey thought that they were. But if that is the case, why the fuss at Abingdon and Woodstock? A possible scenario might be as follows.

Late in February 1518, Wolsey received warning of a ‘plot’. He did not take it too seriously. The secret negotiations with the French continued. Henry decided to celebrate Easter at Abingdon with very little ceremony and a much diminished court on account of the sweating sickness. He did, however, want his sister, Mary, Suffolk’s wife, to be present, and it may be that Suffolk saw this as an opportunity to get back into favour. At any rate, he wrote to consult Wolsey on the subject,
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and both Suffolk and his wife certainly did come. But on 29 March Pace wrote to tell Wolsey that Buckingham also intended to be present.
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Immediately warning signals began to flash. On 3 April Pace thanked Wolsey on Henry’s behalf for his advice about ‘great personages’, and also reported the precautions that had already been taken.
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It is perhaps important to stress that in 1518 neither Henry nor Wolsey had any knowledge of Buckingham’s interest in prophecies concerning his own succession to the throne; that was only to come to light in the autumn of 1520, and was to result in his trial and execution for high treason – and there is no evidence that prior to this they had had any desire to destroy him. Indeed, only two years before, Wolsey had been helping to plan the marriage of Buckingham’s son and heir. What is true is that Buckingham had never been very close to Henry and had been given no place of trust or responsibility, nor was he often at court. Thus, when he announced his intention of coming, and with Suffolk already present, the possibility that the papal warning of a plot might be justified had to be taken seriously. But there appears to have been no panic, certainly no arrests or
interrogations, not even any hint that they were under suspicion. Instead a few discreet measures were taken to ensure that the number of retainers that the two noblemen brought with them to court, or stationed in the neighbourhood, was severely restricted. In other words, presumably because it did not altogether believe in its existence, the government’s response to the possibility of a plot was very restrained. All the same, there had been just enough in it for Henry to feel the need to suggest that an eye should be kept not only on Buckingham and Suffolk but also on any other noblemen whose loyalty to the regime was in any way suspect. Hence his famous letter.

Meanwhile, serious negotiations with the French were being revived. On 8 April the bishop of Paris had written to Wolsey urging him to work for peace between the two countries, as he had done in Louis
XII
’s time.
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On the 14th he wrote again to thank Wolsey for his favourable response, at the same time informing him that an envoy was on the way with further proposals.
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It was to discuss these and the results of the negotiations between the envoy and Wolsey that Henry had made his dash to Greenwich during the first weekend in July, and it was these results that he presented to his councillors at Woodstock. They apparently judged them ‘to be not only for the great tranquility and wealth of the realm alone, but also for the common quietness and wealth of all Christendom’.
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Nevertheless it took three more months, and some very hard bargaining, to complete the negotiations. Most of that bargaining was between Wolsey and the bishop of Paris, who arrived in London at the very beginning of August. Information about it is scanty, partly because it was conducted with unusual secrecy.
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However, enough is known to identify the areas of conflict, and to suggest that by and large it was the French who gave way.

As we noted earlier, the occasion, or excuse, for the reopening of negotiations in the spring of 1518 was the birth of the dauphin on 28 February, and the possibility of a marriage between him and Henry’s daughter, Mary. It was to be laid down in the Treaty of London that the marriage would not take place until the dauphin was fifteen, so that with the high sixteenth-century mortality rate and the changeability of diplomatic relations the likelihood of it taking place was never very great. Meanwhile the betrothal would serve as an earnest of good intentions, and a symbol of what it was hoped would be a long and loving relationship between England and France.
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Under the terms of the marriage settlement Mary’s dowry was fixed at 330,000 gold crowns – a figure only reluctantly agreed to by the French, after a good deal of haggling.
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With any marriage settlement haggling was to be expected, but in this case matters were complicated by the most difficult item on the agenda, the return
to France of Tournai.
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As was indicated earlier, the problem here was to get the right balance: neither monarch could afford to lose too much face: Henry by appearing to give it up for too little, Francis by having to pay too much. And less defensively Wolsey was anxious to exploit this expensive bargaining-counter for something that could not be measured in financial terms – real diplomatic advantage. What precisely Wolsey had hoped for in 1515 is not known but there had been talk of territorial compensation.
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In the autumn of 1517 the French were offering 900,000 francs, which Wolsey estimated as equivalent to £100,000.
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A year later the French agreed to pay 600,000 crowns, or about £120,000. Of this, 50,000 francs was to be paid on the day that they re-occupied the city, the rest in twice yearly instalments of 25,000 francs. In fact these payments would cease long before the sum of 600,000 crowns was reached, because by a complicated arrangement the sum the French owed for Tournai would be written off against the 330,000 gold crowns to be paid them as Mary’s dowry. The amount that the English would receive was, therefore, 270,000 gold crowns, or £54,000.
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At first glance this appears to have been a poor price, for it nowhere near covered the cost of the five and a half year occupation of Tournai. A conservative estimate puts this at £250,000, though some of this, perhaps as much as £15,000, had been recovered from the citizens of Tournai by way of an annual levy.
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This puts the English financial loss at £180,000, rather more than the Crown’s annual income. Admittedly, for this figure Mary, in theory, obtained a husband. On the other hand Francis obtained a newly built citadel which had cost the English over £50,000. Of the two, the citadel may have looked the better asset, though as it turned out it was not to be so. Mary never got the dauphin as her husband, but in 1521 Francis lost Tournai to Charles v and, what was even worse, from 1525 Francis found himself having to pay the English for a city that he no longer possessed. However, none of this was calculable in 1518. The problem here is to know how much to make of the English loss. Of course, it would have been better to have recovered much more for Tournai, but there were limits to what the French were willing to pay. As it is, both over the price for Tournai and the figure fixed for the dowry the French did in the end agree to pay rather more than they had initially intended, which suggests that Wolsey got the best bargain available.
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It is anyway undoubtedly a mistake to concentrate on the book-keeping aspects of the treaty, for the occupation of Tournai had never been a financial venture. What its capture and occupation had given Wolsey was an important diplomatic weapon without which there might well not have been any treaty at all. Moreover, the treaty of London not only committed France to paying England £5,000 per annum for Tournai, but also guaranteed the previous commitment, under the treaties of 1514 and 1515, to pay her an annual sum of £10,000. Fifteen thousand
pounds a year was a considerable sum for one sovereign state to pay to another, equivalent to about a tenth of the revenues of the English Crown. But again, it is not just a question of money. That France was prepared to pay so much is evidence for the success of Henry and Wolsey’s aggressive policy. The payment symbolized England’s dominant role in the relationship, one that her actual financial and military strength did not merit.

The restoration of Tournai was probably the most important single item on the agenda in September 1518, but one that appears to have caused almost as much difficulty was the vexed question of whether or not the duke of Albany should be allowed to return to Scotland.
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The English were determined to prevent this. The French position was more ambiguous. It has already been argued that they had no intention of allowing Scottish affairs to get in the way of successful negotiations with England, and this, even before the Treaty of London, had led to Scottish mistrust of their actions. On the other hand, they did not want completely to sever their traditional links with Scotland which, if the English alliance did not survive, would once again be of the utmost importance. The compromise they arrived at was probably a secret agreement that Albany would not be allowed to return during James
V
’s minority. There is no definite proof for this, but at the time various people suggested that this was indeed what had happened, and various draft clauses have survived.
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Even more convincing is the circumstantial evidence. When the time came for Scotland to join the treaty of universal peace, made at the same time as the treaty between England and France, she refused. Moreover, she showed every sign of being highly suspicious of what had been agreed between those two countries. She also proved very reluctant to renew the truce with England, which was to expire in November 1519, and it needed a combined Anglo-French embassy and a French threat to leave her completely in the lurch before she would agree to do so. Meanwhile Albany was to remain in France until November 1521.
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By that time the Anglo-French alliance formed in London in 1518 was on the point of breaking up. It does, therefore, look as if the exclusion of Albany from Scotland was one of the English gains from the bargaining in September 1518, even though there was no reference to it in any of the public treaties. If this is so, it marked the successful conclusion of English efforts to oust him that had started the moment that Albany had set foot in Scotland three years previously.
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